Seasonal Reading List

Well, the day after tomorrow is Halloween. At least, it isn’t if you go to a church that doesn’t have it. A lot of churches choose instead to have a “Harvest Festival” or, as I sometimes call them, an “It Isn’t Halloween Really It Isn’t Festival.” I admit I don’t get that whole thing. I grew up before Mike Warnke wrote The Satan Seller and scared the helloween out of us all. Heck, our church youth group held haunted houses right there in the Sunday school classrooms and I don’t think any of us grew up to join covens or sacrifice billy goats. (Given what some of us did grow up to do, I’m not sure whether dancing a few jigs around a bonfire might not have been an improvement.)

Anyway, one way or another this time of year ends up focusing on fear so I thought I’d recommend a few of my favorite scary books. Now, these aren’t your basic Stephen King or Chuck Palahniuk stuff with crazed serial killers and zombies and curses and Methodists and one thing and another. Not that I’m a snob about that sort of thing. I like what Bertie Wooster calls “a good goose-flesher.” In fact, if you want something in that vein, I can suggest Dean Koontz’ Brother Odd. It’s the only thing of his I’ve ever read, though I’d like to check out The Coldest Evening of the Year because the title has an allusion to one of my favorite Robert Frost poems and because it’s about a dog. I picked up Brother Odd for the same kind of reason - Koontz sets it in a monastery and I’m sort of a frustrated Carmelite at heart. Anyway, the book is both scary and thoughtful, along with being reasonably well-written.

But that isn’t the kind of book I want to talk about. I want to talk about books that really frighten me because they deal with death and demons and Hell in theological terms. That is a far more realistic approach since the three topics named are exclusively theological. (Well, okay, doctors and other folks get to talk about death but I’ve noticed no one calls in his proctologist to do a funeral.) My point is that people say stories frighten them by being “realistic,” and discussing something “realistically” means discussing it in its proper setting. That makes a theological treatment of damnation much more unsettling than putting it in the context of, say, a creepy abandoned mansion. When I’m done with an Edgar Allen Poe I tend to think, “Thank God that could never really happen.” When I finish one of the works I’m about to name, I pray, “God help me! That could really happen - and to me!”

So what are these petrifying pot-boilers? I will discuss three titles: Katzuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day, The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy, and Charles Williams’ thriller, Descent into Hell. In my opinion, all three provide an extended exegesis of C. S. Lewis’ line in The Screwtape Letters (another terrifying read), where he has the senior demon explain to his protege that “the safest road to Hell is the gradual one - the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.” (And that reminds me! While I’m at it I want to plug a scary movie but I can’t because 1) it is actually a TV show and 2) I’m not sure which one. Last Sunday while channel-strafing I wound up on Chiller and caught part of en episode of “Tales from the Crypt” or “Tales from the Crypt” or something. Anyway, a gnarl of demons sit around a coffee shop late at night as one of them expounds his method of temptation in terms that are very Screwtape indeed. If anyone knows the show I’m talking about and can enlighten me, please do. I’d like to watch the whole thing.) Well, I seem to have drifted. Back to my original thread.

The Remains of the Day: Nobody dies in Ishiguro’s novel. Nothing more scary than an empty gas tank on a country road happens in the whole thing, although one chicken nearly gets squashed by a car. But the book has its own real-life zombie, because narrator is one of the living dead. Stevens the butler reveals himself as a man who has spent his life mindlessly stoking the Molech of the British empire and class structure with any fuel that came to hand - his time, his talents, his father, even the woman he loves. At the end, the god himself dies without forking over any of the rewards he’d promised to his faithful acolytes. The book might well be called The Cremains of the Day, because the hero ends up with the charred fragments of what might have been. I read this book once a year between Thanksgiving and Christmas. I do it as a pleasure (the writing is eloquent) and a discipline, an annual check of my life’s compass to make sure the sunset toward which I sail is not a mushroom cloud.

The Death of Ivan Ilyich: Only one guy dies in this novella, and his demise doesn’t scare anybody but himself. Him, however, it terrifies. Tolstoy’s story amounts to an extended treatment of John Bunyan’s advice, “If a man would live well, let him fetch his last day to him, and make it always his company-keeper.” Ivan Ilyich, a prosperous and respected judge, moves through life from strengh to strength until a lingering terminal illness forces him to confront his existence from the perspective of non-existence. Perhaps the most frightening aspect of the tale is the way that Ivan, like Dives in Jesus’ parable, looks on from Hell as his family and friends follow the same route to damnation and finds himself powerless to warn them. I also read this one annually, between Christmas and New Year’s.

Descent Into Hell: Charles Williams works on the premise that this “real” world merely blankets ultimate spiritual reality and that thus we make no trivial decisions. His protagonist, a military historian named Lawrence Wentworth. Again, there’s not much overt horror in the story. The action is set in a brand-new subdivision built over an ancient battlefield, but we get only one ghost and he’s reasonably harmless. He isn’t even the restless spirit of a long-dead warrior seeking to set right his final act of treachery in the Wars of the Roses or something. He’s just a hapless grunt from one of the construction crews that built the new houses. Wentworth suffers from a recurring nightmare but the whole action involves an image of himself gradually sliding down a rope. There’s a doppelganger, but she ends up being more helpful than otherwise. And that’s just the point: an erudite and respected scholar constructs his own Tophet from these humble raw materials. Worst of all, in the end Hell is not burping pits of brimstone and souls roasting on spits but a sort of eternal senility. It could be subtitled “How to Build Your Own Gehenna Using Items You Probably Have in Your House.”) I don’t read this book once a year. I’m not made out of steel.

So there you have it. Wanna have a scary Halloween? Ditch the jack-o-lantern and paper skeletons. Put on your most comfy jammies, brew up some hot chocolate, sit in a squashy recliner with a good reading lamp and open one of these volumes. If they don’t frighten you, well then, you really should be frightened.

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